Connectionism without Tears

Abstract What accounts for the cool reaction to the emergence of connectionism in the 1980s on the part of people who study language for a living? Most of the critical assessments of connectionism that followed the initial explosion of interest in the approach came from people such as Bever, Fodor, Pinker, and Prince, whose works are firmly situated within the mainstream of linguistics and psycholinguistics. It will be an interesting project for a future student of the history of ideas or the sociology of science to investigate why, as Prince and Smolensky recently observed, connectionism was seen as ‘at best orthogonal and at worst antithetical to the goals of linguistic theory.’ This issue is of particular interest to me as someone who was trained in the standard linguistic-psycholinguistic school of thought but has utilized connectionist modelling techniques in studies of language processing.

My own work has been grounded in the belief that connectionism and linguistics have more in common than some of the more polemical critiques of the approach would suggest. In this paper I will discuss some of the issues that have tended to separate the two approaches and describe some potentially interesting points of contact.